Mara Singleton, ghost hunter,
went pro when California real estate laws demanded that agents must disclose
when a house is haunted. When the Halloways turn to her to examine the
paranormal goings on in their home, Mara agrees—as a favor to old friends.

Everett, Mara’s father, has
always had a talent for speaking with the dead. He reluctantly aids law
enforcement when ten-year-old girls are targeted for kidnapping and murder—as a
favor to an old friend.

Lieutenant Sam Bradford made his
career on killing a serial rapist-murderer, the Predator Priest. Recent reports
indicate a suspect with a similar MO stalking the city, and Bradford seeks
help, both from a higher authority—and from an old friend.

Call it Satan, call it Legion,
call it the devil—how can they stop a rampaging evil ravenous for bodies, for
blood, for meat, for life, for souls? How can they recognize an eternal foe
that clothes itself in the visages of Willing Servants?

Excerpt:

Prologue: November 1991

SERGEANT
BRADFORD LOOKED OUT over the devastation from the safety of his patrol car, the
radio squawking at a barely audible volume. Below, blackened remains of
neighborhood upon neighborhood stretched off to meet the setting sun. When the
last of the contractors′ trucks swept headlights across the empty road and
disappeared over the hill, he got out and walked down a steep driveway to
nowhere. This point, the farthest south and east of the firestorm damage,
looked like a pointing finger from above, as if the fire sought out this one
site, so far from the rest of the burn, with intelligent purpose.

He remembered
the row of cottages that lined the street before the fire, split-levels on the
odd side of the street, single-stories on the even. In a neighborhood most
Oakland residents knew nothing about, gardens blossomed and tall trees grew;
structures and paint appeared well maintained, save for one property.

In his mind, he
could still see the house at the end of the driveway, behind a screen of dead
branches from trees planted so close to the structure that the foundation
reared up. Windows either stared with flat darkness or hid behind gray plywood
patches. While around the rest of the neighborhood stood cords of fresh, white
lumber, this patch of ground remained black and burned, so far untouched by
reconstruction.

Bradford
continued down the driveway and around to the concrete slab, a former porch.
Where the front door once stood now lay a steep drop to the crawl space under
missing hardwood floors. The sergeant stopped here, not wanting to sift through
the charred remains.

″I just wanted
to make sure you burned,″ he said aloud.

His eyes
couldn′t help but trace a trail he himself had followed nearly ten years
before, the length of time this house had been abandoned. Through the front
door, his foot exactly parallel with the lock, charging headlong into a living
room filled with antique furniture and hundreds of knick-knacks and pounds of
fragile bric-a-brac. Screams and growls had come from the other end of the
house. Bradford had run though the kitchen to a hallway, finding three doors.
Two stood open, and his eyes had darted to them and away as quickly. Bradford
was almost certain he’d shouted, ″Police!″ as he broke down the bedroom door,
gun drawn.

His lips formed
the word silently as he stood amid the wreckage. He mused that those two
impacts—his foot against the front door and his shoulder against the one in the
bedroom—set him on a dual path from that moment on. On one hand, it led to a
promotion from traffic patrol to the Violent Crimes Unit, and he believed
subsequently to his current rank of sergeant, on the fast track to command, as
his lieutenant put it. On the other hand, it led to his divorce and his
inability to sleep at night.

Philosophy
aside, he couldn′t shake the goose flesh that crawled up his arms beneath his
warm Tuffy jacket or stop fondling the 9mm holstered on his hip. Even though
the nightmare house remained only a bombed-out hole in a fire-blackened
neighborhood, his memory rebuilt the place more solidly than any contractor
ever would.

His feet had
slipped when he smashed the bedroom door half off its hinges. Slipped in blood
that soaked nearly the entire off-white wall-to-wall carpet, that painted the
walls in arcing spatters, dotting the ceiling and overhead light in bright red.

All of it had
come to him in the quick beam of his flashlight, held away from his body to
make him less of a target for gunfire. On the bed, the beam had caught two
eyes, reflecting the bright light like an animal′s. He was crouched on the bed
on all fours, black shirt, white collar, stripped from the waist down. The man,
too, had been dripping blood, chalk white flesh peeking through in streaks on
his face, his legs. The shirt had shined with fresh liquid, the collar pinkish
with it. When the man saw Bradford, he’d snarled, showing teeth stained almost
black, ragged bits of flesh hanging from the gaps. Bradford had aimed his gun,
a .38 special in those days, at the dark mass of the bloody man′s body.

″Freeze!″ With
his finger slightly squeezing the trigger, Bradford had edged closer. ″Get on
the floor!″

At the same
moment, he saw the woman.

She’d lain on
the bed beneath the crouching animal-man, white hair matted with dark crimson
and brown, eyes staring at nothing. Red had smeared her mouth and cheeks like
ghastly clown makeup. Frail and naked, her age must have been somewhere around
eighty. The old woman had bounced and flailed on the bed with stiff, creaking
movements.

Because the
animal was still fucking her dead body.

And worst of
all, he’d recognized a series of torn, glistening marks running up and down the
victim′s corpse, though his mind desperately wanted not to acknowledge the
fact. But he couldn′t have denied his senses, even in the wan light of his
flash. Bite marks, human bite marks torn into the skin, some surrounded by
drying brown stains—pre-mortem, the coroner would say. The man had savagely
ripped the woman apart with his teeth, eating her flesh before she died, and
while she died, and after…

Bradford′s teeth
had clenched involuntarily.

His gun had
fired.

The man had
jerked back from his victim in a spray of blood—his or hers, Bradford couldn′t
tell—and fell half off the bed. Growling and snarling, the murderer had tried
to rise on palsied limbs. More blood added to the gruesome slaughterhouse, and
more again as Bradford walked forward, still shooting.

In flashbulb
moments from the blasting revolver, the officer had seen the downward-pointing
pentagrams scrawled on the walls, satanic, fresh.

Four, five shots
had entered the predator, making his body jerk, his naked legs spasm, his
red-stained erection fall.

″This is Officer
Bradford. I need back-up at 9092 Greene Street,″ he’d said into the mic on his
shoulder—rote, routine, training.

Six, the last
one in his head right between the reflecting beast-eyes, and the cop had seen
that the eyes were white-blue, darkly ringed, wolf′s eyes.

No breathing.

No twitching.

Bradford had
inhaled, cordite, blood, shit, viscera burning his nostrils, then exhaled hard.
Dumping his shells, he’d reloaded—rote, routine, training—and gone to the
victim. Just a quick look had shown her to be eviscerated from her sparse gray
pubic hair to the visible bone between wrinkled breasts. He’d moved out of the
room, searching the rest of the house, talking in his radio; he needed backup,
detectives, an ambulance; he′d found the Predator Priest, code three, please,
everyone.

Leaving a trail
of red footprints across hardwood floors and throw rugs, he’d checked closets,
cupboards, any place large enough for a man to hide. Point of entry, he saw,
was a jimmied back door leading onto a deck. He’d touched nothing, leaving only
scarlet shoe marks that faded more with each step.

As he’d examined
the grooves on the back lock, a crowbar, he imagined, he froze as the growling
and the screams came again from the bedroom. He’d ran back, slamming his hip
against the corner of the stove, nearly falling. Sirens echoed in the distance,
the sound of little solace compared to the predatory snarls coming from twenty
feet away, the tearing scream of defiance or pain or both—neither sound very
human.

Again, with the flashlight
held away from his body, Bradford had entered the bedroom, this time turning on
the overhead. Shock flooded through him, sudden and cold, leaving him paralyzed
in the doorway.

Light, still
smoky with gunpowder, had blazed clinically down in a solid beam. The body of
the woman once again floundered on the mattress, dead arms flopping. The bony
knees were raised, the feet off the bed. Her torso heaved back and forth on the
scarlet- and sienna-drenched sheets. Howling, shrieking sounds had filled the
room, echoing off the walls. On the floor, the half-naked man had lain dead.
The din rose in volume as the dead woman′s corpse was flogged harder and
harder. Sounds with no source.

Bradford had
pointed the gun at nothing, at the nothing that raped the lifeless body, at
nothing, nothing, nothing there, though he could see indentations around her
ankles where fingers seemed to grip, twin indentations on the mattress where
knees must have been—must have been, but were not. Organs, purplish gray,
green, sickly, creamy white, fell from the open cavity on the victim′s abdomen,
spilling to both sides of her wracked, pale form.

A dresser on the
far wall began moving, bumping up and down on the floor. Pictures fell from the
walls as one, smashing simultaneously on the soft carpet. Both bedroom windows
exploded inward, showering the bedroom with shards of glass, shutters banging
in a gust of unfelt wind. The bed itself lifted, pounding its legs on the floor
but barely disturbing the victim and invisible predator.

Reaching a
crescendo of pounding, screeching, roaring cacophony, the fragile old woman′s
body tore in half, head lolling to the left, gore-slick spinal column and ribs
to the right, meat falling on all sides, with a tremendous rip louder than all
the unnatural noise in the small chamber.

Bradford fell on
his ass, gun still aiming in mid air. At once, the room froze into quiet,
normal stillness, save the quite pat of dripping.

″Bradford!″

Officer Bradford
had twisted, gun raised, finger tight on the trigger. Someone knocked the
weapon from his hand. It went off, a bullet puncturing the ceiling. Cops
everywhere, uniforms, suits, the hall full of people and light, hands shaking
him, someone vomiting behind him. Jump-suited EMTs had run forward in spite of
the voices shouting for them to leave. Then, Bradford had gazed at the ceiling
racing past him like a maze as they wheeled him out of the abattoir on a
gurney.

Standing on the
concrete slab, Sergeant Bradford felt his heart race at the memory from ten
years before. Unconsciously, he took his pulse. Those ten minutes of his life
remained fully focused, fully intact, a burn scar on his mind; yet, the month
after the incident was lost to him. He knew he was hospitalized for a time.
Perhaps for the whole month, but he couldn′t be certain.

Bradford′s
refusal to talk about what happened after gunning down the priest ate away at
him, awake or asleep. To this day, he never said a word about the invisible
presence; to this day, it still festered inside him, waiting to be purged.

At least the
place, the house, the room, no longer existed, the firestorm pointing a blazing
finger and erasing an entire neighborhood. Bradford last visited two years
before almost to the day. He hoped that 7.1 on the Richter scale was enough to
shake the place apart. But, the Loma Prieta earthquake, destroying half the
Marina District over in San Francisco and collapsing the Cypress Structure on
the west side of town, hadn′t touched the quiet neighborhood in the hills,
though it stood less than a quarter mile from the Hayward Fault. Not one crack
in the stucco walls, leaving Bradford to believe that an act of God was not
enough to rid the city of the hellish place.

Now, with the
house razed, the real underlying problem surfaced again. Bradford′s promotion
hinged on the fact that he′d solved the case of a serial rape-murderer, ending
the matter without a trial—only a brief inquiry into his actions that,
considering the violence and the apparent strength of the suspect, passed
without a great deal of scrutiny by the IAB. But in the sergeant′s mind, the
case remained open.

He′d tracked the
Predator Priest, as the papers called him, through several eye-witness accounts
that the detective squad overlooked, mainly due to the proximity of St. Stan′s
Cathedral to the scenes of the attacks, mostly on hunches, mostly on his own
time. Father Mark Joaquin Bloch, actually defrocked for a decade, lived in his
deceased mother′s house three blocks from the church. Through happenstance,
Bradford learned the first murder occurred a week after Bloch′s mother′s death.
And Mrs. Bloch′s resemblance to the other victims sparked a deeper suspicion
than the mere hunches he followed.

For all the good
police work he put in, however, the end result still stood out as unsolved in
his mind. What happened to the final victim, Lorraine Hartwell, white female,
age seventy-eight, was not the work of what the FBI called a sexual sadist.

But what had
happened to her, Bradford couldn′t say. He wanted to know, with absolute
certainty, that it wouldn′t happen to anyone else ever again.

And yet another
hunch, a persistent twitch in the back of his brain, told him otherwise.
Pulling a pack of cigarettes from his coat, he remembered the fatal words of
his doctor two weeks before. He hesitated, staring at the butt of a filter,
then put them away, feeling he needed to hang around a while longer.

″Applying
the strict rule of caveat emptor to a contract involving a house possessed by
poltergeists conjures up visions of a psychic or medium routinely accompanying
the structural engineers and Terminix man on an inspection of every home
subject to a contract of sale. Whether the source of the spectral apparitions
seen by defendant seller are parapsychic or psychogenic, having reported their
presence in both a national publication and the local press, defendant is
estopped to deny their existence, and, as a matter of law, the house is
haunted.″

—Ruling from Justice Israel Rubin of the Appellate
Division of the New York State Supreme Court

About
the Author:

Newspaper founder, bookstore
owner, artist, musician, and slacker Eric Turowski writes lots of mixed-genre
books when he’s not too busy playing laser tag with Tiger the Cat and his
fiancée Mimi deep in the Central Valley of California. He is also the author of
Inhuman Interest (Story By Tess Cooper #1).